ludicity

15 ms·

181.
by ludicity 3y ago
This is an incredible comment. The part that drives people to absolute frustration is that you might be in some weird vestigial organ, either with no purpose or with a purpose not at all aligned with what the organization is saying, and the
182.
by ludicity 3y ago
I was actually writing something on this, so I'm super interested that you brought this up. I have some strong theories, but I must admit I don't have the work experience to be that confident in them.
183.
by ludicity 3y ago
I am the author and uh, I'm worried about what could be that much worse than this. Stories are still welcome at ludicity.hackernews@gmail.com!
184.
by ludicity 3y ago
Hello! Sorry, that whole page is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there are two types of comment on there. One batch is from people that... well, you can see that they're like. The other half I put up there because I think they actually have
185.
by ludicity 3y ago
Let me hit you with the extra spicy take - since the department doesn't really produce business value anyway, taking the system offline for a week would have dropped the bill to 0 and been the greatest possible cost saving. Yes, manage
186.
by ludicity 3y ago
Because it's monopoly money or something man, I don't know.
187.
by ludicity 3y ago
I should clarify, the cost was coming from computers that engineers used to write queries against our database - the 2KB CSV was just how we managed their permissions, and the cost of that was negligible. The immense cost was coming from so
188.
by ludicity 3y ago
Great advice, especially on finding a mentor. I hadn't thought about the importance of finding someone outside your reporting chain. Illegitmi Non Carborundum.
189.
by ludicity 3y ago
This is approximately right. They also almost have one warehouse per two data engineers. I've been told there's a reason and usage analysis has been done by actually smart people, but it just sounds incredibly suspicious to me.
190.
by ludicity 3y ago
You actually got it. If it isn't a bother, I'd actually like to know how you guessed this, as I thought all the Big 4 were roughly the same.
191.
by ludicity 3y ago
I'm not sure what TFA means (the first article), I appreciate being called competent, though the truth is that I'm just less blundering than some other people. I'm here because there's some path-dependence in careers. I
192.
by ludicity 3y ago
Fascinating! I'm young enough to have almost entirely worked on cloud services, but that certainly explains the prevalence of this kind of behavior.
193.
by ludicity 3y ago
Author here! I wrote on something very similar earlier a few weeks ago, down to a reference to Japanese office culture (though not the exact same part of it). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37806870
194.
by ludicity 3y ago
At my workplace (the one in the post), whenever one of the good engineers asks about how something works and it's one of these spaghetti-balls, we chorus "It's the design of our backend, okay?"
195.
by ludicity 3y ago
I am the author and this has caused me psychic damage.
196.
by ludicity 3y ago
It is a big legacy business. A lot of the workday is actually nice because of the low performance expectations, but it sure grates on you if you want to do anything good.
197.
by ludicity 3y ago
I'm the author, and this is a fair point, but whatever version of Agile you are describing is unrecognizable to me. It is not how most managers seem treat it due to a mixture of poor understanding and organizational pressure (for ex
198.
by ludicity 3y ago
I'm the author, and funnily enough I absolutely agree. The moment a company thinks being "Agile" is interesting enough to mention at any stage during interviews, I'm out . I usually get to know the engineers at an emplo
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by ludicity 3y ago
Of all the responses, this is the one that demonstrates the strongest understanding of me.
200.
by ludicity 3y ago
I suspect the organization gets too big, and the communication overhead + politics takes over everything else. That is, I think it is theoretically not possible at a large organization, except in very rare circumstances where you've
201.
by ludicity 3y ago
Agreed. Author is a pretentious moron, and it's people like him that ruin companies for everyone else. Absolutely toxic. I just wish he'd keep these opinions to himself instead of spreading them around the internet, lowering our c
202.
by ludicity 3y ago
I would love to have a look at your favourite reading material on this topic. I must admit that, while I've seen many attempts at improving things across numerous organizations (and the contacts through my blog give me a lot of vicario
203.
by ludicity 3y ago
Some super easy heuristics. If it's a government agency, or some other organization where it's possible that they're genuinely stunningly incompetent, I usually ask to see a Git repository. It's shocking how many places
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by ludicity 3y ago
It all depends on your personal standards. This is a much more measured take than what I wrote above, and probably more accurate. Of course, Sturgeon's Law is obviously not literally true in every domain. 90% of people can successfully
205.
by ludicity 3y ago
Very fair critique. I just thought it was very obvious, but perhaps I should have elaborated. The article is not confused about why Derek exists (I feel bad for anyone named Derek now!), it is about why Derek is not incentivized to change,
206.
by ludicity 3y ago
I have had the good fortune of many, many blog readers with years of life experience writing in to me, and there are indeed places that aren't like this. They tend to be extremely small and have awesome owners. Everywhere big seems to
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by ludicity 3y ago
I can't go into a lot of detail for reasons of anonymity, but suffice it to say, this involves handing out spreadsheets to stakeholders, uploading them to Git repositories, then performing some truly unholy rites to create stuff in AWS
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by ludicity 3y ago
So true, haha. One of the engineers I look up to the most told me the same thing - he became a manager and was awful at it... which is why I didn't get into management. I suspect I'd recognize I was worse, but I'm much happie
209.
by ludicity 3y ago
I've written elsewhere on this. I actually did drastically reduce my work hours and begin exploring other careers, plus starting my own business. However, it didn't seem like it was my place to tell people what they should do, and
210.
by ludicity 3y ago
A few people really fixated on "bad", even though I'd never endorse calling a non-fictional person bad right to their face, if only because I don't think work is a good reason to make anyone feel bad (unless they're

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